


Babylon

by FundamentalForces



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-12
Updated: 2015-05-12
Packaged: 2018-03-30 05:51:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3925246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FundamentalForces/pseuds/FundamentalForces
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the prison falls, Daryl contemplates survival.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Babylon

**Author's Note:**

> I own nothing.

He would never tell her that he counted every day, every day after leaving the prison.

Every day that had passed without finding traces of the people they once knew.

Not telling her wasn’t because he didn’t take her seriously. Whatever perspective he had from before, it had been broken and replaced, starting that night on the porch of that shit shack with those almost kind of eternal eyes of hers. How had he never noticed? But he knew, because he had never looked. No, had just never seen past.

Hershel was inside her, almost like a beacon. That ghost-presence of inheritance frightened him now that he had seen it, but it also warmed him.

He would always expect the world to give up on him. He was the scrawnier, stupider, less valuable son and younger brother. Carol had allowed him to finally see past that mess. Carol was the start of everything, his purpose, his ability to be whatever the hell he wanted to be, but he had stalled. And then Beth’s words had ascribed a kind of value he wasn’t sure Carol would have ever voiced.

 _Last man standing._ Carol would have lumped herself into the equation. Survivor.

Beth seemed to stand herself on the outside.

\--I’ll keep going, keep going ‘til I die. You’ll just keep going forever. That’s the difference—she clarified to his silence later in the deeper night when they were far away from the burning wood-rotted ruins. But when her silence stretched thin, he needed to understand.

\--What difference?

\--I expect to die. I don’t think you do.

He wanted to say, you’re not going to die, but he couldn’t, because everyone would. Even him.

\--Not right now, you won’t. Those were the words he wanted.

\--Not right now. And he thought he heard a tentativeness to believe, that unfailing desire to hope and grasp something in her little, wise voice, for all the teenage and naive bravado.

\--But alcohol is the wrong thing to live for, he added.

\--Oh I’m done with that. I had my taste. That’s all I needed.

\--All you needed was to see me act like an asshole. He elbowed her in the side with gentle force. She pushed him back.

\--Stop, Daryl. We’re not drinkin’ again.

\--Good.

After that night, he allowed himself to be more open. If she did something he didn’t like, he told her. You’re not walking off alone, he said, just to make right your bucket list.

She was like a flame, desperate to fight for air, needing to fulfill that list of random desires in order to feel alive, to want to live, and she would push back. She’d walk off again.

When she had done that before—before things changed—he thought it was some kind of attempt to make him follow her; she had to know he would have to follow, to watch, to make sure, to protect, and that burden sometimes made him burn inside—one of the few things that kept him angry and alive. But he realized, after their moonshine talk, that she wasn’t thinking about making him do anything. She was giving him the choice.

_Let me die._

He promised himself he wouldn’t mention her wrists ever again.

It wasn’t until the shrouded early dark of one morning as her little breaths escaped in sleep across a makeshift camp that he thought about the way she’d held him. He had cried. It should have been humiliating—it was something he would never have been able to do, not even in front of Carol, maybe especially not Carol—but with Beth, it reminded him that she had her own strength. She had held him up with a kind of feeling alone. Total acceptance, if that were something. Total trust. That frightened him, too. Even more so, the lack of culpability. If a walker made it past their defences and ripped her apart, he didn’t think she’d look at him with recrimination.

What had he ever done to deserve trust and acceptance, and from someone who barely knew him?

He barely knew her, despite these months sharing the same food, shelter, friends, and fears.

But maybe, now, there was something greater.

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta'd.


End file.
